Coming back to Apple Music, iCloud Music Library still problematic?!

[KUguardgrl13]

Hey all! When Apple Music first came out I did the free trial but decided I wasn't ready at the time to pay for the service. Now I've decided to come back, but I've run into some issues. When I originally signed up for Apple Music, my existing iTunes Library uploaded pretty smoothly. There were some quirks as I recall, but nothing was deleted.

Now fast forward to today. I realized I had turned off iCloud Music Library on all of my devices and decided to turn it on again, naively thinking my songs from my Mac would upload and then be available on my iPhone. Ha! I left it be for a little while and came back to find that my playlists were completely empty of songs, but the files were still on my computer in Finder. So I turn off iCloud Music Library, and everything looks good. Then I take a closer look and realize that all of my non-purchased music (CD rips, downloads from other sources, etc.) are gone and all that remains are my iTunes purchases. Crap! Thankfully I have a Time Machine backup and was able to get everything back to how it was before I decided to mess around.

Anyway, how do I enable iCloud Music Library and keep my playlists without having to do them all over again? I really would like to enable this feature so that I can have my music available on my personal devices as well as a MacBook Air I use for work. I have not enabled anything on the MBA and don't have access to it at the moment, so this would only be on my two MacBook Pros (running different versions of OS X/Mac OS) and my iPhone for now. Help?!

 

[M. Gustave]

Apple Music can't delete any files on your MacBook in iTunes unless you answered yes to something, or deleted the files yourself and then downloaded Apple Music copies (which have/had drm).

Suggest you save all your media externally, then start from scratch, re-upload/match everything.

 

[KUguardgrl13]

Apple Music can't delete any files on your MacBook in iTunes unless you answered yes to something, or deleted the files yourself and then downloaded Apple Music copies (which have/had drm).

Suggest you save all your media externally, then start from scratch, re-upload/match everything.

The files were always there. iCloud Music Library tried to wipe my playlists in iTunes. I was never given an option to merge libraries or anything like that. I just turned iCloud Music Library on, it looked like it was uploading some things, and suddenly my playlists were empty.

 

[M. Gustave]

The files were always there. iCloud Music Library tried to wipe my playlists in iTunes. I was never given an option to merge libraries or anything like that. I just turned iCloud Music Library on, it looked like it was uploading some things, and suddenly my playlists were empty.

Ok, empty playlist isn't the same as deleting actual song files from your system. Let's keep the facts clear.

 

[KUguardgrl13]

Ok, empty playlist isn't the same as deleting actual song files from your system. Let's keep the facts clear.

Read my original post. I never said it was deleting files since they were still there in the iTunes folder in Finder from the beginning.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I've found that the "matching" aspect of Apple Music is problematic enough to change my strategy:

I copied my entire music library to a different folder...as a temp backup. It's already backed up elsewhere.
I deleted my entire music library from my Mac and from the iCloud Music Library...starting from "zero".
I am adding albums that I did have copies of back into Apple Music from their servers (not even downloading them).
If Apple Music does NOT have the album, I re-added it to Apple Music and let it upload.

This is preventing a lot of weird "wrong track" matching that was occurring as well as preventing songs that shouldn't be uploading from doing so.

One thing I've run into...iTunes on the Mac seems to think some of the albums are already in my library and won't let me add. In every case I've been able to add them from my iPhone.

As to playlists...you can export and import those. However, I don't know if AM can figure out playlist tracks that have been changed as per my new strategy.